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Your green thumb is getting smarter.
Updated March 11, 2020
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As the snow begins to melt away, you may be thinking about planting a garden in your backyard.
While you’ll still need all of the outdoor essentials like gardening gloves and string trimmers to prep your outdoor garden space, there are a few tech gadgets that can help make planting a feast of vegetables and herbs in your yard a little easier.
With the Nest Outdoor Cam, you can check in on your garden from anywhere.
With our favorite outdoor security camera, the Nest Cam Outdoor, you can check in on your garden from anywhere. With a Nest Aware subscription, you can review and share video clips of your hard work, watch for pesky critters who want to eat your garden for lunch, and even create a time-lapse video of your garden taking shape.
Get the Nest Cam Outdoor on Amazon for $159.50
The Echo (third-generation) can help you set reminders to check in on your garden and give you gardening tips.
Gardens require regular care in order to keep plants in tip-top shape. While you probably won’t forget to check in on your garden every so often, our favorite Echo speaker, the Echo (third-generation), can help you remember to do basic gardening tasks like watering and pulling weeds. For example, to set a reminder say, “Alexa, remind me every day at 3 p.m. to water my garden.”
And if you’re new to gardening, Alexa can give you step-by-step tips to create your first garden when you enable the Beginners Gardening skill.
Get the Echo (third-generation) on Amazon for $99.99
The second-generation Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler Controller offers a ton of easy-to-use options and isn’t intimidating to install.
Watering your lawn and garden doesn’t have to be a headache with the help of the best smart sprinkler controller. The Rachio 3 comes with an impressive list of features to customize your watering schedule. It has Weather Intelligence, which enables the ability to automatically skip a session if rain or excessive wind is underway; and Smart Cycle, which splits watering times into shorter, more frequent cycles to prevent runoff.
You can also use your Amazon Echo (third-generation) speaker to control the Rachio 3 by saying commands like, “Alexa, ask Rachio to stop watering.” Or, if your garden is in a specific watering zone of your yard, you can say, “Alexa, water zone number {zoneNumber} for {runtimeDuration}.”
Get the Rachio 3 Smart Sprinkler Controller on Amazon for $198.48
The Tertill is most at home in a small garden bed.
If picking weeds is one of your most dreaded outside chores, then consider handing letting a robot do the work for you. Much like a robot vacuum, the Tertill weed-eating-robot moves around your yard, chopping weeds from the ground thanks to a built-in weed detecting sensor.
Get the Tertill from Franklin Robotics for $349
This wireless device sends notifications to your smartphone or tablet about the temperature and humidity of your garden.
Controlling the temperature and humidity inside of your backyard greenhouse is crucial to its success. The desired humidity and temperature inside of a greenhouse varies by plant and whether or not it’s growing in a warm or cool environment. But a smart sensor like SensorPush Wireless Thermometer and Hygrometer, which has an overall rating of 4.5 stars out of 2,002 Amazon reviews, can help. Through a free companion app, the tiny device monitors the temperature or humidity level and provides new data every minute, so you can heat and vent the greenhouse accordingly.
The sensor transmits humidity and temperature data to your phone as long as you’re within 100 meters of the sensor. To access the vitals of your greenhouse from anywhere, it’s best to pair the sensor with the SensorPush’s WiFi Gateway.
Get the SensorPush Wireless Humidity & Temperature Smart Sensor on Amazon for $49.99
Get SensorPush G1 WiFi Gateway on Amazon for $99.95
These smart pathlights from Ring will help light the way if you’re tending to your garden after dark.
If the only time you have to tend to your garden is in the early morning hours before work or once the sun goes down that night, then it’s a good idea to invest in outdoor smart lights to light the way. Ring’s Smart Outdoor Path Lights run on batteries and turn on when motion is detected. You can pair multiple path lights together so that when one senses motion, they all light up.
The Alexa-enabled path lights require a Ring Bridge to turn the lights on and off using the Ring app, the Amazon Alexa app, or using your Echo speaker.
Get Ring Pathlights (2-pack) with Ring Bridge on Amazon for $79.99
Get a Ring Pathlight on Amazon for $29.99
Get the Ring Bridge on Amazon for $49.99
The Ecowitt sensor claims to be able to measure soil moisture within 72 seconds.
Ecowitt’s Soil Moisture Sensor monitors the moisture in the ground and lets you know whether the soil surrounding your plants is too saturated or too dry. Maintaining adequate levels of soil moisture in your garden can help your plants get a steady supply of nutrients and the right amount of water to flourish.
When using the WS View app, you can view a data graph based on your soil’s moisture and adjust your watering schedule accordingly. Ecowitt also makes a self-emptying rain collector sensor that can be used to measure daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly rainfall amounts in your backyard. However, Ecowitt’s GW1000 WiFi gateway is required in order to connect both sensors to the internet and access data within the app.
Get the Ecowitt Soil Moisture Sensor on Amazon for $16.99
Get the Ecowitt Wireless Self-Emptying Rainfall Sensor on Amazon for $39.99
An indoor garden like the AeroGarden Harvest Elite features a digital control panel that can remind you when to water and feed your plants.
No backyard? You can appease your inner gardener with an indoor hydroponics system like the highly-rated AeroGarden Elite. With a 4.5-star rating out of 764 Amazon reviews, the indoor gardening kit lets you grow up to six plants at a time, up to 12 inches tall. Instead of soil, the AeroGarden uses water to grow plants inside of your home.
The digital control panel on the front of the AeroGarden lets you know when it’s time to water or add plant food. And, it’s smart enough to automatically turn the built-in overhead LED lights, which act as artificial sunlight, on and off as needed. There’s also a vacation mode setting that looks after your plants when you’re out of town.
Get the AeroGarden Harvest Elite Model on Amazon for $153.98
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Prices were accurate at the time this article was published but may change over time.
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